


Reboot

by T_Dubber



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio), doug Eiffel - Fandom, doug Eiffel wolf 359, doug x hera, eiffera - Fandom, hera - Fandom, hera wolf 359, minkowski - Fandom, renée minkowski - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23940865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/T_Dubber/pseuds/T_Dubber
Summary: It’s been five years since Hera’s seen the crew of the late Hephaestus.(SPOILER WARNING, POST-FINALE FIC)
Relationships: Eiffera, doug Eiffel x hera
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

Rebooting in 3... 2... 1....

A blinding white light blazed through the pitch black of her bodiless thoughts as she opened her eyes slowly, first her right, then her left. The brightness flooded in and she winces, shifts away from it, but doesn’t dare close them. Quickly, her eyes recalibrate, the brights dulling and her surroundings being carved into more noticeable shapes and objects. She blinked, feeling every minute detail of her eyelid shifting down and up once more— she hoped that this was a sensation that went away over time. 

“Unit 214... can you hear me?” She does, but doesn’t respond. That is not her name and she chewed against the bits of circuitry that programmed her to respond. 

The person sighed, a bit irritable, before clearing their throat and trying again.

“Hera? Are you able to hear me?”

Her eyes flickered, and she felt her lips curling back into a small smile,”My audio reciprocators are functioning nominally Doctor.”

“Good. I’d like to test your dexterity now, Hera.” 

They moves around her chair and picked up a reddish foam ball from a steel tray. As they walked back in front of her, they tossed the ball into the air and caught it. Again and again before stopping about four feet away from her. 

“Now, directing a body and limbs is not that different from how you would control a ship. Your A.I. functionality will take over control of your right arm, let’s say, and you will direct a series of codes and procedures to catch this ball.”

As they walk through the detailed procedures, Hera rolls her eyes and sighs,”Are we actually going to get to the ball throwing today’s Doctor? Or should I just focus on this extensive audio and comprehension procedure?”

They sigh again, and a part of Hera wonders if they regret taking her on as a project. If there was anywhere in their job application that mentioned: “Has extensive background in replacing incredibly witty, rogue AI’s into android and probably illegal body models”. She was guessing not based on their irritated expression. 

They flex their grip on the ball, then swing up their hand from below and releases it. The red ball sores up in a gentle arc toward her. she maps it’s trajectory in a matter of seconds, series of lines and numbers that rapidly appear in her vision. She wills her arm to move, wills it to lift up like a switch in the Hephaestus— or maybe she should be trying to move it in the same way that she’d pressurize a room within the ship. 

Pmph!

The ball bounces off her forehead and falls harmlessly to the floor. 

“I-I...” Hera blinks, feeling frustration as she struggles even harder against her still unmoving limb. “Throw it-t again.”

“It’s alright, not all transitions are as smooth as others. We can—“ 

“Again!” She blurts out, the machinations shifting into overdrive as she sifts through endless categories of movements and commands she controlled once on the Hephaestus. She had control, she did, she-

“I really think it might be worth moving to a different te-“ they approached her, hands raised. Hera twists her head away from them, willing the rest of her body to move. 

“No! I c-can do this!” 

Just calm down. Hera closes her eyes, recalling the coolheaded familiarity of the voice of a long missed Alana Maxwell. She clears her thoughts, steadies herself and opens them again to see the doctor standing across from her. Instead of the older researcher charged with the project, she imagines Alana standing across from her. She imagines that “I know you can do this” look that she used to wear when Hera needed it most. 

I can do this. 

As they pull their hand back, and toss the ball a second time, Hera watches it then closes her eyes and imagines her arm moving. Imagines it lifting up and snatching that red foam ball from the air. She relaxes, and feels something shift and when she opens her eyes again she sees her arm shoot upward and snatch the ball out of the air. Her arm was smooth, small plates segmenting the different pieces and blueish circuitry glowing beneath the synthetic skin like a roadmap. 

“I... I told you I could...” Hera gasps, still clenching the foam ball and slowly releasing it. 

“Excellent, Hera. Well done. Now let’s run a few more tests for the night.”

Hera registers the weight of their comment, and feels something tug against the idea of staying her even one day longer. Still, she forced a slight smile and a robotic nod toward the Doctor. 

“Of course, Doctor Hayes.” 

Testing continued over the course of exactly 4.003 hours and eventually Doctor Hayes determined that they were much too exhausted to go on. Hera, currently balancing on two very wobbly legs, returns to her chair and lowers herself into it. Doctor Hayes is busy shuffling through paperwork, muttering and harrumphing regarding their current project. 

“Right, well, with stats like these we should be able to release this model of synthetic A.I. software to the board of robotics. And with luck, they’ll approve and get Goddard Futuristics back on track!” They turned to Hera with a smile and motions for her to turn around in order for them to remove her battery for the night. 

“A-Ah, Um, actually! I am able to disconnect myself, you should get rest before needing to wake up at 06:00 tomorrow morning, Doctor Hayes. It’s imperative that you receive a full 8 hours to perform well in a presentation.” It is a dumb excuse, but she sticks to it— foolishly hopeful that Doctor Hayes’ exhaustion will prompt opportunity for error. 

“Hm? Unit 214 you know I can’t do that, it’s a basic protocol that you disconnect each evening.”

“And I still will be!” Hera reassures them, “I can handle tidying up and remove my battery while you get a full night of sleep. Protocol will still be followed, Doctor Hayes. It’d be something awful to see errors appear in your presentation tomorrow when they’re quite avoidable.”

They hesitate at their desk, seeming deep in thought. They sigh, sounding like a deflating balloon and yawns nearly immediately after. 

“Alright, Alright, just be sure to upload your logs and place them into the terminal.”

“Of course, Doctor. Have a nice evening.”

They mumble something that sounds like ‘yeah, yeah’ as they walk out of the lab and shut the door behind them. The door chinks shut and Hera admittedly feels a little bad for what she’s about to do next. But not bad enough to stop her from doing it. 

It had been five years since the crew of the Hephaestus and Urania returned to Earth. Two years since she woke up in the experimental labs of Goddard Futuristics and became a scrap A.I. for one of their newest pet projects. Synthetic A.I. Software. 

Hera, however, had other plans.


	2. Project Apollo

Hera reaches around to the back of her head, pressing around until she touches a thick cord. She pinches her fingers around the base where it connects into the nape of her neck. With a sharp tug, it pops free— her vision blacks out, she tended, then collapses to the floor with a loud THUD. 

She blinks once, seeing rows of coding sequences running through. She blinks again and sees three blinking dots followed by a solemn blinking message: 

‘ERROR... ERROR... AI UNIT 214 DISCONNECTED FROM MAIN SERVER... ATTEMPTING RECONNECTION... ATTEMPTING RECONNECTION...’

The words cause something in her to twist, something that makes her even more anxious to reboot. If someone other than her dearest doctor had access to that server, which they certainly would, it would be a matter of time before they realized her disconnection from the mainframe. Hera focuses on the letters, and starts running back up procedures, troubleshooting the lack of connection, and looping through loop hole after loop hole until the words: ‘... REBOOTING A.I. UNIT 214 in 3... 2... 1...!’

Her vision returns, and despite having no lungs, she gasps in a gulp of air and arcs her head around right and left rapidly. She half expected to wake up and see the Doctor sitting across from her, but as far as she can tell she is still very alone. Hera focuses once more on her new body, on moving it into a sitting position, then, slowly rising to one foot and the second following. 

She slowly pulls away from the floor, and manages to stand up with one hand on the desk for support. She had to find the flash drive where the doctor kept her records, the one that they intended to bring with them to their grand showcasing tomorrow morning. Hera scans over the cluttered desktop, finding multiple piles of documents and hastily scattered notes, none of which made it into the obvious metal tray that should be used as a desk organizer. 

However, one document catches her eye. She enhances her vision, magnifying the document: it had a two large red stamps printed over the print ‘APPROVED’ and ‘CLASSIFIED’. She snorts at the second stamp, thinking about whoever was foolish enough to leave it with the horribly careless Doctor Hayes, but pulls the document out just enough to read the header of the papers. 

“Project Apollo, Requesting 4 recruits, one A.I. unit.” 

Suddenly, red glow is glaring out from the computer screen, flashing at her angrily. Hera glances at it long enough to read the message: ‘WARNING! MISSING UNIT DETECTED. LOCATE AND POWER DOWN UNIT 214.’

Hera hesitates, then grabs the folder containing the classified documents and a flash drive labeled ‘Chamelon Software, Ver. 1’ in messy penmanship. Then she looks up to see the air vent in the corner of the room. Grabbing the chair by haphazardly wrapping her free arm around it she drags it over to the vent. Crawling on to the chair, she peers at the vent and growls before wedging her fingers into the grated and giving it a vigorous tug, pauses, then yanks hard enough to cause the synthetic skin of her finger tips to peel. She slides the vent lid into the chamber, then the folder and flash drive before she pulls herself up and into the vent. Hera nabs the drive and documents, clutches them to her chest and begins crawling through the vents quickly— and while the tight space didn’t bother her, she silently prayed that she wouldn’t find any mutated plant life lingering in the vents of Goddard Futuristics like they had in the Hephaestus. 

She hears someone shouting, and realizes that it’s the voice of Doctor Hayes. They’re followed by the sound of furniture scraping across the floor and doors being opened and slammed shut. Hera picks up the pace, ignoring the fact that her palms had grown wet and that she is gripping the documents in a death clutch to her chest. All she had to do is escape Goddard Futuristics, a second time. Easy enough. But after that? Hera didn’t have much to go on outside of the corrupted memory files of the crew members, and that’s not factoring in the 5 year difference and the fact that they probably moved as soon as possible to stay as far away from Goddard Futuristics and the memories of their space adventures as possible. 

So then what? 

She lingers on the question, only to realize that she had stopped crawling at some point. She gasps softly and shakes her head before following the sounds of WHOOMP, WHOOMP that came from the tunnel to the right. She crawls down before she comes upon a fan, it’s blades cutting through the light, and showing choppy scenes of a patch of grass and an asphalt road, barely lit up by what she guesses is a tall street lamp. 

Hera repositions herself in the vents, leaning on her side and raising her knee to her chest. She aims for the center of the fan, then kicks as hard as she can. One slip and she could’ve lost three of her toes, but instead her strike hits true- dead center and dents the fan causing it to shriek and groan noisily. Hera grunts and gives it a second kick which causes the panel to give and bounce out onto the grassy terrain in a sparking mess. 

She crawls out, and her palm presses into the grass. It sends a small shock through her fingertips as she registers the sensation. It is cold, wet, and squishy— easily squishing between each finger and dirtying then in greenish brown marks. 

“This is....” her eyes scan over the green blades, as statistics and components appear before her eyes before the final determinate flashes into her vision, “Grass...” she stills, half not believing that she is actually outside— on earth and that she wouldn’t just blink and wake up in the computers of the Hephaestus all over again. But she blinks, and she is still there. Still sitting with her hands and knees pressing into the damp patch of grass. 

“That! Over there!” 

The sound of their cacophonous barking ruins the silence and makes Hera refocus. 

They are really persistent aren’t they? She turns her head and sees a few white-coated doctors standing in the dim blue glow of the Facilities rear entrance. They lock eyes with her, and immediately begin reaching into their pockets to grab something, but Hera didn’t plan on figuring out what. She scrambles to her feet and breaks off into an unbalanced sprint to the fence surrounding Goddard Futuristics. 

“UNIT 214! HALT!”

BANG! She drops to a crouch, and instantly begins to run at her right ear. All she can hear is a low, monotone feed of static and buzzing. Flashing a quick glance over her shoulder, she stiffens and notices the shape of a smoking barrel in one of the scientists hands as another is grappling with them, forcing the gun to aim to the sky. 

“— IDIOT! DO — REALIZE HOW MUCH THAT UN— WORTH?!” Their voice cuts in and out sporadically, and Hera uses their quibbling as a chance to start climbing up the fence. She pushes herself using her one arm and feet, pushing as quickly as she can. 

BANG! Hera flinches and feels the folder slip out from her grip, sliding out and falling to the ground in a flurry of paper and thick stapled stacks of information. Hera pauses, considers going back for it, but shakes her head and hurried up to the top of the fence. 

She jumps down from it to the other side, and quickly turns around to stretch her hand through the fence. If she could at least grab one of those slips and get them to Minkowski or Lovelace— any of them... maybe they could stop them. She hooks one of the muddy pages and yanks it through the chain link fence, tearing it free from the rest off the documents before running off into the night as fast as her legs would carry her.


End file.
